Again, I couldn’t say the words but didn’t have to.
“Where were you, Zach?”
“Looking” was his answer.
“For your mom?” My voice cracked, but I didn’t hide it.
“We didn’t find her.”
“She found us. In Cambridge. She killed Walter Knight.” I made myself look at him, see the hurt that filled his eyes. He already knew about our mission, of course. But I had to say it anyway. I had to be the one to tell him, even if he wasn’t hearing it for the first time.
“I’m so sorry. If she hurt you…” He ran his hand along my neck and shifted my head, as if to make sure everything was the way it should be.
“I’m fine.”
“I’ll kill her.”
“Don’t say that, Zach.”
“But I will, Cammie.” He pulled away from me then, as if he couldn’t bear to touch me with his hands—dirty hands. Like I deserved better than to be touched by the hands of a killer. “Someday. I will.”
“No.” I reached for him.
“Yes.” His voice was sad, not cocky. It was like he’d seen the future, and he was finally telling me the thing he’d always known, Zachary Goode’s great and final secret. “I will.”
“Where were you, Zach? What happened to Mr. Solomon? To you?”
Zach ran a hand through his hair. He was far too young to look so exhausted.
“You know how we started out tracking my mom.… Well, we figured the best way to find her would be to find whatever Circle descendant she had her sights set on next.”
“Which one?” I asked.
“Delauhunt,” Zach told me. “Frederick Delauhunt. He’s an arms dealer. We tracked him down to this fortress outside of Buenos Aires. He probably had fifty armed guards. And we could tell by the activity in the compound that they were getting ready to move him. We should have waited for backup, but I kept thinking about what would happen if we didn’t find him again. I thought about what they did to you. And then I got stupid.” Zach took a deep breath. “And Joe got hurt.”
He eased slowly away, almost like he was content to leave me, like deep down he knew that I was better off without him. “You should probably go to bed, Gallagher Girl.”
“I’m not sleepy.”
“You should go to bed anyway. Try to get some sleep.”
I leaned into him. “No. I shouldn’t.” I took both his hands in mine and stepped backward. “Do you want to see something cool?”
“What do you think?” he asked with that roguish grin he’d first given me when he’d walked through our doors as an exchange student. Before things got complicated. Before his mother changed my life.
I walked to an old candelabra that the housekeeping staff rarely remembered to clean, so it was dusty when I reached for it. And pulled.
Slowly, a door opened a crack. “What is that?” Zach asked, creeping closer.
I took his hand again. “Come on.”
There was a time when I loved being in the secret passageways on my own. I would slip inside the darkness and disappear, be alone in the middle of a hundred people, be myself inside a place where you spend most of your time learning to be somebody else.
I’d never shown that one to Bex. I’d never brought Liz or Macey there to study. That was my private passage, and as I held on to Zach’s hand, it felt very much like it still was. Only then, it wasn’t mine. It was ours.
We squeezed together through dusty corridors and tight shadowy spaces, skirting between decaying beams. It must have been the servants’ quarters once upon a time, because there was a round window there in the narrow space. It stared out to the east, across the grounds and the hills and the trees.
We stood together, looking out at a world that was covered with frost, a shimmering white glow.